Author Archives: thedoctor

You need a Platform that Supports Sustainability

I think we can all agree that sustainability is important – very important. You might be in business to make money, but the only way you’re going to make money is if you stay in business. The only way you’re going to stay in business is if you’re sustainable, because, otherwise, you risk running out of resources, money, or, and I’m not kidding, customers. The earth is finite, so it stands to reason that there is only a finite amount of any resource. A company has a finite amount of money, and wasting it is the quickest path to going out of business. Today’s consumer is concerned about the environment – harming it will drive them away, and with no customers, you have no business.

So how do you achieve this magic of sustainability? Well, you can achieve it the same way you achieve everything else in business – hard work, perseverance, and ingenuity. But the real trick comes in sustaining sustainability – and the best way to do that is to have not only supporting processes and methodologies, but a supporting platform as well.

A supporting platform can help you keep track of your initiatives which can range from your office recycling program to your global waste reduction initiative. Recycling efforts within a single large office building can save hundreds of thousands of dollars. As noted in a now classic S&DC article on “Building the Green Supply Chain”, the Boulder Community Hospital reduce, reuse, and recycle program saved the hospital $600K a year. On a global scale, Walmart saved 2.4M in shipping just by reducing packaging requirements. And Interface Inc, in their effort to move to a zero environment footprint, have saved more than 260M in the first decade of their sustainability program.

More importantly, it can also help you get control of your global sustainability initiatives when it comes to environmental impact reduction, social responsibility, and prevention of animal cruelty. Unlike internal waste reduction initiatives, which often do not exceed the complexity of making sure the used toner cartridges were shipped back to the manufacturer, global sustainability initiatives require you to also insure your supply chain does not violate the initiatives you commit to. Just because you don’t have a sweatshop, pump out toxic emissions in excess of the Kyoto protocol, or skin cows alive does not mean that your suppliers do not.

In order to insure that you have a supply chain in compliance with your initiatives, you have to track relevant information from your suppliers and have them track the corresponding information from their suppliers. This is an insurmountable challenge unless they can provide you with the information you need directly into your systems, as the average large company has dozens, if not hundreds of essential tier 1 suppliers and thousands of less critical suppliers. This requires a web based platform capable of securely collecting, storing, indexing, aggregating, and unifying all of the relevant information from each supplier.

Furthermore, depending on where you want to do business, sustainability might be more than just an initiative – it might be a fact of life. If you want to do business in the EU, you need to comply with REACH and RoHS, and possibly half a dozen other directives. California has introduced its own green legislation, and parts of Asia, suffering from severe pollution as a result of the rapid build up of manufacturing capability over the last few decades to meet the demands of American and European multinationals focussed on low cost country sourcing, may not be far behind. You have to not only maintain all of the documentation necessary for compliance purposes, but have to be at least 99.999% certain you are in compliance before making a shipment into the region. If even the tiniest removable part of your electronics system, such as the removable power cord, is not in compliance, your entire shipment could be blocked, seized, or destroyed.

This dictates the need for a platform that tracks not only all information related to your sustainability programs, but all product related information from raw materials through final production. This is the only way to minimize your risk of non-compliance. That’s why you need a Supplier Information Management (SIM) solution, or an e-Sourcing/e-Procurement solution with enhanced Supplier & Sustainability Information Management. Fortunately, you have a lot of options. We’ve covered many on SI in the past and will cover more in the months to come.

Successful Supply Management Organizations are Empowered

“What Works for Nations Works for Business”, and what works for business works for organizations within the business — Supply Management included. This recent article, over on Chief Executive, that reviews the new book, Why Nations Fail, noted that just as nations flourish when they foster political and economic institutions, and they fail when power and opportunity are concentrated in the hands of the few, companies are setting themselves up for trouble when decision making is almost entirely restricted to top executives. Similarly, your Supply Management organization is setting itself up for trouble if all (major) decisions have to pass through the Director or, even worse, CPO.

In order for your supply management organization to be successful, your people have to not only be in a position to make the decisions that need to be made when they need to be made, but feel empowered to make such decisions. They need to know what authority they have, when they have it, and feel trusted to use that authority. They should only be going to their manager, director, or CPO when a new issue arises that is beyond their experience where they should have some guidance to solve it. And if your supply chain organization is filled with talented, empowered people, this is not an event that should be happening every day.

I’m keeping this post short because I want you to read the article on “What Works for Nations Works for Business” and dig further into this issue, both in the SI archives and the CE publication. It’s one issue that should not be overlooked.

What Elements Are Truly Necessary To Prevent Missing Links in Your Supply Chain?

A recent article in Canadian Transportation & Logistics that asked “where the missing links in your supply chain are” did a great job of of pointing out that when it comes to supply chains, what you see is what you get. And it often is the situation that the more you can see into the chain, the more benefits you can receive.

It also hit the nail on the head when it noted that the ability to view timely, accurate information from the beginning of the chain to the end is essential for:

  • reliable forecasting
  • accurate decision making
  • minimizing risks
  • optimizing inventory turnover
  • reducing days and costs in supply chain cycles
  • healthy cash flow and profits
  • customer satisfaction
  • competitive advantage

But when most companies rely on a patchwork of systems and software to address supplier management, purchase order processing, receipt of goods and inventory management, did it have the right checklist of critical system and software capabilities required to avoid the critical missing links that are currently present in most enterprises that are not Supply Management Leaders?

The article identified these necessary elements, which we’ll take one by one:

  • Real-time detailed visibility into every key juncture
    i.e. demand, procurement, production, transportation, and inventory and accounts payable (to make sure the invoices match the order), market data (to make sure quotes are reasonable), risk data (to detect potential volatility or issues as soon as the signals appear), and trade data (to inform you on issues of regulatory and customs compliance)
  • portals connecting the entire supply chain from order through deliver
    what year is this? 2002? there has to be e-integration all the way down through you supplier, and their suppliers, to raw material providers for key or scarce raw materials, but it doesn’t have to be a portal; heck, it could be as simple as the pull of a daily update EDI file from a secure FTP server or as complex as real-time asynchronous communication between multiple databases in a replication configuration
  • collaboration capabilities that allow stakeholders of the chain to readily share information on supply and delivery
    and communicate with each other, in real time, when they are both online
  • ability to integrate varying information formats from various supply chain partners
    which is a given and should be automatic; again, it’s 2012, not 2002
  • open-endedness with flexibility
    enabling easy modifications and integration with other systems and this is a definite must — avoid any system with proprietary integration methods
  • capability of generating alerts of events that require attention
    throughout the supply chain as most day-to-day management should be exception based, with the exceptions defined on your rules (and not the vendor’s)
  • ability to create “dashboards” that enable consolidate viewing of information from multiple sources
    in a manner that focuses on problem areas identified by missed metrics, bad data, missed data, or declining trends — generally speaking, you don’t care about the green, only the red

These were quite good, but it’s also very important not to overlook:

  • sourcing, procurement, logistics, and global trade solutions
    this could be one solution with dedicated sourcing, procurement, logistics, and global trade modules (or views) or multiple solutions that are interconnected — you need end-to-end sourcing to identify the right deal, procurement to secure it, logistics to get it delivered on target, and global trade to make sure there are no costly, disruptive snags
  • an analytic solution
    that lets you analyze trends and predict demand levels, market cost changes, and potential disruptions
  • out of the box ERP support
    because chances are that a number of supply chain partners are going to have one of the big ERP solutions and be relying on it at least partially
  • security
    as there will be a lot of sensitive data flowing back and forth — make sure it is encrpted and only accessible by authorized parties
  • adoption
    how many companies are currently using the solution, how big are they, how much third party support is there and what is the long term outlook for the solution

But if you can meet all of these requrements, and the collaboration flows, the the solution is probably going to prevent many of the critical missing links in many of today’s supply chains.

Purchasing Blues

Editor’s Note: This is a repost of “Purchasing Blues“, which was originally posted on June 20, 2009.

Well, it’s time to raise a fuss
  and it’s time to raise a holler
About diminishing returns
  from the corporate dollar
I just heard from my boss
  who governs me
If I don’t save the cash
  he’s gonna fire me

Sometimes I wonder
What I’m gonna do
If there ain’t no cure
For the purchasing blues

My CFO he told me to
  go beat on the supplier
That his margins must be high
  while ours are under water
So I talked to the supplier
  he said costs were elevated
He was losing all his money
  at the rates we had created

Sometimes I wonder
What I’m gonna do
If there ain’t no cure
For the purchasing blues

So I found a consultant
  told her about my problems
And she went and discovered that
  the supplier was just stalling
Material costs were falling
  and the exchange rate was fair
I had wasted all my time
  just pulling out all my hair

Next time I have a problem
  I’ll find me a solution
I’ll find a sourcing expert
  and get my retribution

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
And I feel fine

That’s great, it starts with a web-shake, noobs and trolls,
get terrified – the doctor is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to the web churn,
bloggers serve their own needs, dummy serve your own needs.
Feed it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength,
The ladder starts to clatter with fear fight down height.
Wire in a fire, representing seven games, entrepreneurs for hire and a lagging site.
Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furries breathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing!
Fine, then.
Uh oh, overflow, population, common news, but it’ll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself.
Web serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
  dummy with the rapture and the revered and the right – right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
And I feel fine

Last Friday, TechCrunch ran a post that asked Where the Hell Are All the Rants? that noted that ever since some of its most prolific writers left the blog game to either a) become entrepreneurs or b) become investors, the tech blogosphere has been quiet — too quiet. And by quiet I mean so noisy that it’s difficult for anything of any substance (or signal) to come through. And the doctor agrees. Lately, he’s been reading TechCrunch less and less. Heck, this week it was almost indistinguishable from TUAW with all the me-too Apple coverage. I have to say I miss the TechCrunch of old where the bloggers asked How the Hell is This My Fault because not only did those posts have substance, they had character. You can find bland coverage on any old site. But you can’t find deep thought, real opinions, and the willingness to call out the elephant in the room and call a duck a duck (when it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck) on any old site.

To cut to the chase, no rants, no real opinions and willingness to make them known. No real opinions and willingness to make them known, no individuality. No individuality, no point. And that’s why it just may be the end of TechCrunch as we know it.